Alistair Urquhart
Alistair Urquhart was conscripted into the British Army in 1939 and was one of the Gordon Highlanders stationed at Fort Canning, Singapore. He was there when the Japanese invaded the island. Urquhart was taken prisoner and forced to work on a 420-kilometer-long section of the Burma-Siam Railway. Surviving for years on nothing more than a cup of water and rice a day, he worked long, brutal hours in the sun and continuously suffered from numerous tropical illnesses. The overseers were particularly cruel and at one point Urquhart was tied up for two days in the blistering heat of the day and cold of night. They splashed cold water on him anytime he lost consciousness.
When his two days were up he was locked in a tiny, half-submerged cage for days on end. It took contracting and surviving cholera to finally get away from the hellish slave camp. Even though he survived the cholera, he was left with dysentery, malaria, beriberi, and he could not use his legs. His captors sent him to a hospital where he was kept for six months due to the grace of a doctor who took pity on him.
But his captivity was not over, and in September 1944 he was loaded onto a Japanese “hell ship” where 900 British POWs were forced to stand in the dark, hot cargo hold. The ships were called “hell ships” not only for the heat but because men were known to go mad and resort to cannibalism. After six days, the ship was hit by a torpedo and sunk. Urquhart managed to get to a raft and floated on the open sea for 5 days before he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship. He was loaded onto another “hell ship” and this one did reach Japan.
Instead of working on a railroad, Urquhart was now used as slave laborer in a coal mine. He was so weak and ill that he could barely stand, making him useless in the mines, so he was moved to the camp hospital just 15 kilometers from Nagasaki. He was there when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, and he recalled being thrown sideways by the blast. Despite his weakened condition, he survived until the end of the war when the British finally liberated him and the other POWs held by the Japanese. His years of starvation and torture affected him for the rest of his life, but he lived to be 97 years old.